


The Bear

by Escalus



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Hunters & Hunting, Murder, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-02
Updated: 2017-12-02
Packaged: 2019-02-09 08:55:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12884427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Escalus/pseuds/Escalus
Summary: The untold story of Tamora Monroe and what happened after.





	The Bear

In the middle of the night, she listens for them.

Tamora never hears them, because they’re not actually in her apartment. They aren’t waiting for her out in the hallway. They aren’t stalking through the kitchen. They aren’t hiding under her bed or lurking in her closet as she thought they were when she was eight years old. They probably don’t know who she is or that she lies there in her bed, trembling, waiting for them to come.

They’re out there, though. She’s seen them, but she still doesn’t know anything about them beyond the fact they could hurt her again.

The week she spent in the hospital was almost worse than the actual night she spent among the torn-up bodies in the school bus. Some days, she had been lost in a drugged and pain-induced fever dream. Other days, she had had nothing to do but lie there and think. The doctors said she was lucky; while her wounds had been deep, there had been no irreparable damage to her organs. They did tell her that if the sheriff hadn’t found her when he did, she would most likely have bled out.

She had listened to their prognosis and smiled. She had joked with the kind doctors as they explained what she would have to go through to recover. No more bikinis for her!

The jokes made excellent distractions, when the truth is that she doesn’t feel lucky. She feels ground up and spit out. She feels vulnerable when she moves. She panics when she doesn’t move. There were times, in the first few weeks after she left the hospital, when the nausea was so intense that she thought her head was going to burst. She imagined it cracking open like a rotten fruit and all her thoughts would spill out over her shoulders in a wave of viscera. Her head didn’t explode though; she kept breathing. 

Finally she had had enough of simply breathing. She wanted to do more than heal. She wanted answers. That’s why she is sitting in the sheriff’s office, listening to the official explanation of what happened.

He tells her that it was a bear.

He is, of course, the sheriff. He was the one that found her on the bus. He explains carefully and with great gentleness what he think happened that night. He is kind. He’s actually pretty funny, using humor to make her comfortable, to lower her defenses, to see him as a friend and someone in whom she can trust. At any other time, she could imagine herself becoming his friend, if she hadn't been painfully aware that he is lying to her with every breath he takes.

It wasn’t a bear.

She’s a guidance counselor. She’s a good one, and one of the traits that a good guidance counselor needs is the ability to see the underlying motivations when someone is explaining a problem to you. The sheriff is older than the students she usually deals with and more assured and more used to editing the truth, but he can’t hide his tells completely. He knows the truth, and he has no intention of telling her what really happened. She suspects he is protecting someone.

At the end of their meeting, she says good-bye politely. She walks out of the sheriff station and onto the street outside. The sun is shining. People are doing incredibly mundane things like shopping or work or living their lives. The breeze is just cool enough to be refreshing. It would be perfect weather to go for a walk in the park or to have a picnic in the forest, but she can’t even conceive of something like that. 

She feels like screaming. She feels like grabbing people and shaking them. There is a monster out there. There are monsters out here! 

If the sheriff of the city can’t tell her the truth when a dozen people had been slaughtered, that means the creature could still be out there. If the person who saved her from death on that bus is so compromised that he can’t tell a victim what exactly attacked her that means she’s not safe. No one is safe.

She has a choice. She can pretend nothing like what happened to her was going to happen ever again. She can pretend that the world works exactly the way she sees it indicated on the local news. There is an appeal to pretending. She could fold up what happened to her into a neat little box and store it in the attic of her mind and hope that it only crawls out once in a while to give her blood-drenched nightmares.

Or she could find the truth. She could shine a light into the darkness and see what had been waiting for her there.

She makes her decision as she walks to her car.

*****

Tamora stares at the pile of print outs and photocopies on her dining-room table. The more ecologically-minded part of her mourns the waste of paper when she knows that she has all of the information saved digitally as well, but she wants to see it. It’s harder for a physical object to disappear. Or to be taken away.

Discovering clues hadn’t been near as hard as she thought it was going to be. Evidence leaped off the pages of the newspaper as she went through the Beacon Hills Examiner’s digital archives. She read about animal attack after animal attack after animal attack. She noticed specific names appearing at regular intervals. She gave each of them their own files: Hale, Argent, McCall, Stilinski, Whittemore, and Martin. 

There had been so much that had happened that it had grown too quickly for her notebook. So she had to organize. On the wall where she used to have paintings her mother had done for her, there is assembled a timeline of strange events in Beacon Hills. Event after event, death after death, with no answers.

It did not make her feel any better to discover that she wasn’t the only person who had been lied to. 

She picks up the phone. She has called so many people in the past months that she has this part down pat. 

“Hello. You don’t know me, but my name is Tamora Monroe. Several months ago, I was attacked by something that nearly killed me. I was told it was an animal attack. I don’t think it was. I know that a member of your family was killed, and you were told, just like me, it was an animal attack. I would like to meet with you and talk to you about it.”

She speaks the words rapidly; she needs to get all of them out before their defenses come up. People don’t like to share their tragedies with the world. Just like her, they’re uncomfortable with the idea that what they think happened couldn’t possibly happen. 

Sometimes they pretended that they had moved on. “I’m sorry, I don’t really want to talk about it.” She could hear the fear in their voices. They think that if they keep their head down they’ll be safe.

Sometimes they reveal that the fear had consumed them. “I moved. I moved away. My brother died. He died in that school and no one cares. Don’t call again.”

Sometimes they reveal that anger had become a constant companion. “You’re telling me that an animal broke into a sheriff’s station and killed my sister and three other armed police officers, and no one killed it or even identified it? Yeah, I’ll fucking talk to you.”

Sometimes they even gave her clues. “You want to know what how fucked up Beacon Hills is? Ask about the surveillance tapes at the hospital massacre that disappeared. Ask the sheriff where his son was that day. It’s all a big fucking cover up.”

Mostly, though, they gave her the courage to go on. Hundreds of people had died without a single person being brought to trial for their deaths. Thousands of people had lost someone close to them without any closure. There was a hole in their lives, filled with flimsy deception and the urge to bury your head in the sand.

She wasn’t going to bury her head in the sand.

This conversation went as most of them did. They didn’t want to talk about it. Tamora replies graciously that she won’t bother them again, and then she hangs up. She isn’t here to hurt the victims

*****

Tamora records all her interviews.

“He took our dog to the veterinarian, because I asked him to. Bullet was sick.” The man talks softly, and she has to get him to speak up. “And he never came back. You can’t ... you can’t imagine what it’s like to feel like you sent your son to his death.” 

“No, I can’t.” She says softly. She is glad she cannot. She can barely hold it together because of what happened to her; she can’t imagine feeling as if she was responsible for her son’s death. 

“The worst part is that … they never caught the person. There was no trial. I couldn’t look the person in the face and hate them.” He rubbed at his eyes. “The only person who I can blame is me.”

“You didn’t know that would happen to him.” There is a fine line, she has found, between allowing people to feel their trauma and allowing them to wallow in it.

“I know that, but it makes no difference. All I want is the truth.” He breaks down crying. “He’s my son, and he’s gone, and I don’t know why.”

She hands him a tissue and allows him to cry. It is so inadequate, but it is all she can do for him now. It’s all anyone can do.

*****

February bothers her. She looks and looks for any evidence that she read a new book, or conducted an interview, or searched for a clue, but there is nothing. It’s like she just stopped what she was doing for a whole month.

And she doesn’t know why.

*****

It doesn’t make sense until June.

“So, Nolan, your teachers tell me that you are having a serious problem paying attention in class.” She smiles at him. “This happens to a lot of students during summer school. I can help you with a few techniques to make it easier.”

“No. They aren’t going to help.” Nolan is looking anywhere but at her face. “I just don’t like being here.”

“No one likes summer school, but …”

“Not summer school. This school. I wanted to change schools, but my parents wouldn’t let me. They didn’t believe me.”

She thinks for a moment. “What wouldn’t your parents believe?”

“I was in the library. They said there was a bear. They weren’t bears!” Nolan exclaims loudly and then suddenly looks scared, as if he can’t believe he had just done that. “I’m not crazy.”

This is when she doubts her mission. She has the right to choose how she responds to trauma, but she doesn’t have the right to influence other people in how they respond to trauma. But she can see it tearing away at a seventeen-year-old boy. It’s eating him. Soon, he’ll be a shell, a hollow ghost useless to himself or others. He needs someone to believe him. He needs someone to show him how to feel safe again.

“They weren’t bears. What were they?” She says with all the conviction she can muster.

Nolan blinks at her, jaw slightly agape. It’s the look that she has grown to know very well. He’s never had anyone believe him before. 

“They told me it was a bear, too, but I know it wasn’t. So tell me, Nolan, what were they?” 

“Werewolves.” He whispers. 

“More than one?” She asks. She radiates as much trust as she can. It makes sense. It makes ridiculous amounts of sense. “Why don’t you tell me what you saw?”

*****

Tamora runs into Natalie Martin in an empty hallway. “I heard congratulations are in order.”

“Thank you.” Natalie smiles at her. “I hope I do a good job.”

“I’m sure you will.” She has to smile as well even if she doesn’t feel that way. She feels like she’s talking with a conspirator. Aside from the corrosive secrets of Beacon Hills, she has no doubt that Natalie will make a good principal. “I do have a question, if you have some time right now?”

“Yes?” Natalie is jubilant about her promotion, so she’s not prepared. 

“What’s Teenage Hallucination Syndrome?” You confront the liars. You make them explain themselves.

Natalie’s face froze, but she was good enough not to let it shatter. “Where did you hear that?”

“Several students talked to me about an event that happened in the library last fall. You convinced them it was … Teenage Hallucination Syndrome. I’ve never heard of it.”

Natalie watches her while her smile quickly loses any warmth. “You do what you can for students, especially for students here in Beacon Hills. Adolescence is difficult enough without complicating their many problems.”

“Oh, I know. So what do you suggest that I do about it? Some of them are in need of … _real_ help.”

Natalie brushes it off. “It’s a good thing they have you. Beacon Hills High School has had a lot of trauma in the last few years.” 

“I hope that I can help with that. I really do.” Tamora knows that Natalie knows. Of course, she had to know. Her daughter’s name has shown up a lot in her investigation. “I’ll do everything I can.”

*****

Tamora knows that the teacher’s break room is a refuge for every teacher at Beacon Hills High. This is where they get to talk about students without worrying about being overheard or whether they will be judged for not being perfect human beings.

Tamora makes it clear to everyone that she understands that as mature as they have to be, teenagers can get on people’s nerves. She’d much rather have these teachers express themselves here than express it in the classroom.

There is rage. There is exasperation. There is gossip. Lots and lots of gossip.

“So, tell me about Scott McCall.” Tamora sits down across from Michelle Finch.

She knows that Mrs. Finch is a legendary terror among the students. Finch sees her duty is to weed out the weak among the students in her advance placement classes, because she doesn’t want to give them false expectations. The hard sciences aren’t for the fair-weather student.

She also knows that Michelle is respected for her knowledge by the other teachers, but she is not the most sociable person. She doesn’t go out with the other teachers after school; she doesn’t chaperone dances or get involved in decorating for the holidays. 

Michelle looks up from her enormous roast beef sandwich. “He’s a good student, but he’s got problems with setting priorities. When he’s focused on something, he is as talented as anyone I’ve ever taught. If he’s distracted, he makes mistakes.” 

Tamora laughed. “I was told that I wouldn’t get a bullshit answer from you.”

“Who has time for that?”

“What do you think about him as a leader among the student body? He’s popular among people who don’t usually interact with jocks.” 

“I don’t pay much attention to student’s social calendars,’ Michelle sniffed.

Tamora raises an eyebrow. Her answer is a cop out. 

The biology teacher sighs. “He’s a leader, but he’s too kind. He’s the type of person that will spend all of his time trying to make everyone happy. They’ll stomp all over him. They’ll use him up and wring him out. Then they’ll blame him when he doesn’t come through for them every single time. People who care that much are done by thirty.”

Tamora is stunned by the venom. It feels like projection to her. “That’s pretty dark.”

“The world’s pretty dark. We may dress it up with performance reviews and reality shows, but we’re still animals. It’s eat or be eaten.” To prove her point, Michelle took a bite of her sandwich.

“Who knows, he might be stronger than he looks.”

Mrs. Finch snorts. “Nobody’s that strong.”

*****

She readies to hunt. It took her a bit to figure out that her target was Brett Talbot, because he wasn’t a student at Beacon Hills High. He’s another lacrosse star for a fancy private school. Of course he is. If you had enhanced strength, stamina, and speed, wouldn’t you play sports?

He has a web page. On it, he lists the bands he likes and the illegal clubs he likes to go to. He has no fear he’ll get in trouble. Lots of girls like him and say so. Lots of boys like him and say so. His pictures are smug and cocky. The only redeemable feature on that page he seems to have is that he loves his sister. (Her name goes on the list.)

Why shouldn’t he be cocky? He’s a wolf among the sheep.

He has to be one of them, but she will make sure before she does anything. She will look the monster in the face, and she will show him that she’s not afraid. She is not a sheep.

She drowns her concern that he may be completely innocent or that his only crimes were underage drinking and a superior attitude. This is because she only knows one thing: he could have killed dozens of people and no one would ever know. That is how it works in Beacon Hills. 

She hasn’t solved any of the unsolved animal-attack homicides in Beacon Hills. Neither has anyone else. There is a war in the shadows and she and people like her have paid the price for it Humans have been slaughtered as _collateral damage_ and no one has even put up a token of resistance against it. 

She is the resistance.

*****

Gerard Argent studies her dining room. He is silent as she waits in the doorway. He studies the timeline and the files on the table. Finally, after he looks like he had quite enough, he turns to her. “You did this all by yourself.”

“I didn’t have much choice.” Her voice remains steady.

“No. I’d guess you’d didn’t.” He pins her with a look. For an old man, he can be very intimidating. “What do you want?”

“The truth. That’s all. Once I know the truth, I can make my own decisions. I can protect myself.”

“And you can protect others.” He adds and he chuckles like it’s an inside joke. “Ask your questions.”

“Did your daughter burn down the Hale House?” She needs to know she can trust him, so she goes for the hard questions first. 

“Yes.” He sounds proud.

“Why?” She remembers the stories. There were children in there. 

“Because I told her to.” Gerard gestures at the table. “Let’s sit down. I get the feeling this is going to take a while.”

“Why did you tell her to?” She nods but she doesn’t sit, not yet. She has to evaluate the old man in front of her. He knows a lot more than she does. 

“It is what my family does. It is what my family has always done. Hunt monsters.” He sits down. “If you want the full story, you’re going to want to take a seat. The story is a long one.”

She sits. And she listens.

*****

Scott McCall is not what she thought he would be.

He begged her to stop. She knows enough now that he could rip her in two if he really put his mind to it. He’s physically the most dangerous of all the ones she has now identified. According to the eyewitness reports, he fought the Beast and survived. She knows its name now; she knows it’s dead. The nightmares change but they don’t go away. The truth is even worse than she thought.

“I don’t understand him.” She says out loud.

“You don’t? He’s not hard to understand. He’s a child with too much unearned power and not enough experience,” the old man grumbles. “He doesn’t look at the big picture; he only knows that he doesn’t want to see anyone die.”

“He’s eighteen and that doesn’t sound all that …”

“He’s an alpha. You have to stop thinking of them as people, Tamora. How many people have the supernatural monsters of this town killed under his leadership?” 

She knows the answer as well as he does. “Too many.”

“No matter how noble he thinks he is, he’s responsible for the deaths of hundreds because he couldn’t let his mother die. If he and his friends hadn’t reactivated the Nemeton because they could, hundreds would be alive that aren’t. You would never have been attacked.”

“Your son would be dead,” she points out. 

“A leader has to make decisions based on the greater good. Stopping three deaths by causing hundreds is not a good decision. And he has to be held responsible for that decision.”

“I know.” She wonders if she would have made the same decisions. She had a best friend when she was about that age. Would she have been able to sentence him to death if he had been possessed by an evil spirit that no one knew how to exorcise from him? Would she have been able to kill that friend to save others? 

But she’s not eighteen. She is far older, and now the answer is yes. She has power now, and so she has to make that decision. “How do we get him?”

*****

She demands answers from her people. They can’t give her any. She can’t reach Gerard either. Things have steadily gone from bad to worse. She demands to know what happened at the hospital. She knows what has happened at the school.

“You lost.” It’s Liam Dunbar’s voice over the radio.

She does not smile as she retreats, but she knows that the little beta is indulging in the arrogance of youth. Did she lose? 

Most of Beacon Hills is returning to their comatose slumber, sheep waiting to be picked off by the predators in the dark. But not all of them. 

Gerard Argent is most likely dead, but she has his training and his knowledge. What’s more, he made it clear that she is his heir, not his turncoat of a son, so she has his reputation.

The McCall Pack remains alive, but there are a lot of monsters who are dead and will not have the opportunity to prey on others. She has made people safe by doing the difficult thing – the necessary thing.

Did she lose? No, she did not. Because she is still alive, and she has the truth. It will be with her no matter where she goes.

*****

The next time she is in California, she kills Peter Hale. It’s almost too easy because for all his bravado and boasting about how he is willing to do what is necessary, he’s ridiculously easy to trap. All you really need to do is play to his ego.

Peter Hale thinks he’s better than everyone. He’s smarter. He’s wittier. He’s more ruthless. Some of which might be true, but that type of hubris is its own weakness. 

So what she does is send a young and inexperienced hunter to break into his vulgarly expensive apartment, smash the place up like an amateur, and make sure that there’s enough of a trail for him to follow. Unlike Scott McCall, Peter Hale doesn’t like calling upon others for help. His revenge is his pleasure. 

So, Peter tracks the young man down to the safe house that Tamora had provided for him. She can’t even remember his name off the top of her head; he should be getting drunk with his frat brothers and not hunting werewolves, but the bait had to be realistic. Peter easily defeats the boy and is in mid-monologue as he’s gearing up for some form of humiliating torture when she has the snipers put a half-dozen rounds into him. It’s not fatal, of course. 

They storm the house. The young man yells at her in fear and panic; he’s pissed himself. She lets him; he’ll learn in time. The world they live in has shades of gray and if she has to lose a few of her men to protect innocents from the predators, she will; she can always find more hunters. While he’s yelling, the others cut Peter in half. End of story.

But Tamora is learning to be more cautious. She is fighting monsters with knowledges and ancient rituals that she does not have access to. She removes Peter’s head and has both halves of the body burned to ashes. One set of ashes she has buried at the Nemeton. The other set she airmails to New Jersey and has dumped in the Atlantic Ocean off Cape May. 

The head she keeps with her, preserved in a jar. If he can come back from that, she reasons, he deserves to win.

*****

The local sheriff in Kentucky is sweating and swearing at the same time. With his help, she just put down a family of werewolves who had lived in his county for decades. He never knew. No one ever knew. The sheriff is near retirement and frightened out of his mind. He worries if he can now solve a few of the unsolved murders in his county.

The tired old man pushes his hat back up on his head. “They had friends in the community. No one is going to believe that they were monsters. Hell, I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.” 

“No one ever does.” She is harder now then she first started. Empathy doesn’t help her anymore; determination does. She’s not here to walk this yokel through the steps he needs to get right with what needed to happen. She needs cleanup to be done and then she has to be on to the next hunt.

“What do I tell them? When people ask how their neighbors died, what do I say?” He looks at her pleadingly. It’s pathetic.

“Tell them it was a bear.” She walks off. She is so done with this conversation.

*****

In the middle of the night, they listen for her. 


End file.
